This blog entry by another author reminded me irresistibly of the period in late 1978 when there was a considerable turnover in the Vatican – in that a long-serving Pope passed away of more or less natural causes, followed by the usual ceremonies, followed again by the lengthy ceremonial ritual of the college of cardinals selecting and installing another pontiff. All these occurrences made for considerable news coverage through our network lead station, FEN-Tokyo, and some inadvertent hilarity on my part, listening to one of their staff announcers (owner of a magnificent resonant speaking voice and the most vacant skull ever recorded in the possession of an AFRTS broadcast specialist) repeatedly mangle the phrase “papal encyclical” in news releases. There was a good reason – several volumes of them, actually – that this broadcaster was famed as “The Ted Baxter of the Far East Network. He was a legend in his time…

Lo and behold, after  weeks of noting all these stories out of the Vatican (it was a very dull period with regard to major news developments in international news, I think) … Pope John Paul I passed away after barely three weeks and change in office. (The shortest Papacy on record, it seems – even counting some of the very earliest in the times of Roman persecution or later corrupt Renaissance shenanigans.) One of my NCO supervisors mused, “I guess the excitement was too much for him,” while my friend Marsh wailed despairingly, “You know what this means?! Another month of Dead Pope!!”

09. May 2025 · Comments Off on The Fun of Primary Historical Sources · Categories: Memoir, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

I am working like a busy little literary beaver on the second of the YA frontier western series, the Kettering Family chronicles. I thought from the first to make the main and viewpoint character always a tween or teen, but making it a series and having the story romp over twenty years of interesting pre-civil war events in the various gold and silver rushes while still maintaining the viewpoint of a teen or tween. The work-around for that challenge means that now each book is planned to focus on the adventures and characters of consecutive Kettering children…

Anyway, the main character in the work in progress is Sally Kettering’s little brother Jon, and the early and curious days of the California gold rush. It appears as if the plot will keep the family in Sacramento. Which will be a nice change for me, as Sacramento is one of the places where I lived in real life. Only for a single year as it turned out – but I did enjoy the heck out of living there, visiting Old Town and the Railway Museum, as well as actually traveling up into the gold rush country – Coloma and Placerville – a couple of times. (To Truckee and Lake Tahoe, as well, if only briefly.) California was a livable, interesting, affordable and relatively sane place to live in once upon a time, so I have those recollections and local specific knowledge to draw upon.

But the other element is – old local histories. I have found a couple on Googlebooks, scanned and collected volumes retrieved from dusty and unfrequented and likely deserted library stacks. The closer in time to events recorded, is all the better for my purposes. Also, the more unfocused and gossipy is even better, for that becomes precious little nuggets, bits and bobs and curious personalities which make for a more authentic read, once carefully worked into my own narrative. I downloaded and read about a dozen 19th century Civil War women’s memoirs for That Fateful Lightning, even though I had a goodly number of professional modern historians’ references. It’s the same with this book – those chatty, rambling, first-hand accounts are pure gold.

19. March 2025 · Comments Off on Thinking About a Continuation · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

A bit ago, I wrote about continuing stories, and one of the books of mine that I touched on was the story of the two cousins during WWII, Peg Becker Moorehouse and Vennie Stoneman Vexler in My Dear Cousin. The whole concept came to me in a dream, which is not a totally eccentric way to get a notion for a book, but one which has only happened once to me. But it was the one set of lives that I thought there might be a continuation for past the limits of an accounting of their lives before and during the war. That book ended on an optimistic note, with Vennie married to her perfect Mr. Darcy, and Peg and her children reunited with her husband, a prisoner of war by the Japanese.

There aren’t really happy endings in real life, I think – only happy intervals and if we are fortunate, those intervals are long ones. Otherwise, our lives are a sequence of dark and bright. As it happens, the end of the Second World War was one of those illuminated periods, although for some parts of the world there was just more of the same but with a different cast of characters after the summer of 1945. The Iron Curtain slammed down across eastern Europe, the survivors of the Holocaust fought to continue living in a sliver of a new nation in the ancient land of Israel, India was violently partitioned, and Communist-led and inspired insurrections or civil wars broke out across the Far East almost as soon as the ink on the Japanese surrender was dry.

When I looked at a couple of my books, speculating on possible but unwritten aftermaths, one of those speculations touched on the characters in My Dear Cousin. I wondered if Vennie would really adjust and be happy in the role of a stay-at-home faculty wife to an academic. After all, she had been raised on a rural ranch, trained and worked as a nurse, and had an adventurous war as a military nurse … would she really make a successful marriage to the product of a wealthy, and worldly East coast urbanite? I speculated that it would take a long adjustment time for that to happen. Perhaps they would separate for a time, and she would return to nursing,  rejoining the Army  as a military nurse in Korea.

The real-life couple whose experiences I based some of Peg and Tommy’s experiences in wartime Singapore and Malaya returned to their rubber plantation after the war – but eventually had to leave Malaya, when the Communist insurgency there made life too dangerous for their family to stay. I thought that Peg and Tommy, being from the same kind of background – one having grown up managing a rubber plantation, and the other as part of a ranching family – would have no more than the usual post-war PTSD to ruffle their marriage. But they also would have to leave, and start again somewhere else, probably Australia.

Anyway – the prospect of continuing with a matched set of characters, and the same concept of letters back and forth – is still in the formulative stage, but it is intriguing to construct: two different theaters, wracked by war and unrest, two women trying to cope and make sense out of it all. A historic irony to this is that in Malaya, the local Communist insurgents had been allies of the British, and supported by them during the war, while at the same time Korea had been unwilling allies of the Japanese. It has been reported that often the most brutal guards of Allied prisoners in the Far East were Korean draftees in the Japanese Army.

I’m just toying with the concept for now – I have two other books simmering on the burners for now – the final Luna City installment, and the Gold Rush YA sequel to West Towards the Sunset – but it’s not me, unless I have several projects all going at once…

16. March 2025 · Comments Off on Things Change – Not Always for the Better · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

I’m trying to fire up a schedule of book events for 2025, this year, since Wee Jamie is old enough to be taken places that don’t interrupt his schedule too much. One of the multi-author venues that I had previously enjoyed doing was the West Texas Book and Music Festival, in Abilene – I think we made the road trip, hopscotching along back-country roads north from Junction, through Ballenger…… to Abilene at least three times. I liked it at least as much for the chance to take pictures of back-country Texas, as I did participating in a community-supported book event, with other authors, and people who liked books, and wanted to support authors, reading books, libraries and generally the community. The West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene had enough juice to invite writers who had been heard of outside of Texas as guest speakers – Elmer Kelton was one, who unfortunately passed from this vale of tears a bare month or two before I had a chance to meet him at the Festival in the fall of (gasp!) 2009. I did meet Paulette Jiles and Scott Zesh the following year, and we got some lovely photos of a balloon festival which was being held in Abilene the very same weekend.

We stayed two nights in a tiny cabin at a KOA campground in Abilene, which was the cheapest option available to us – yes, I am not so well-known that I have expenses paid. This year, for various reasons, we could afford the road-trip and two nights at a hotel or campground, so I looked up what was going on, as far as book festivals go, in Abilene – but it seems like that event has withered up and died, without a trace on social media. The Covidiocy canceled the event for 2020. I had a reply to an inquiry last year that they were already full-up, thanks for asking. I made a mental note to ask about this year, but ll the links that I have are dead, or go to the civic website.  From what I can tell, it may have been incorporated into the big yearly book event in Austin. A deep sigh, and on to investigating other small book festivals.

On the note of things that change and not for the better, my daughter and I, with Wee Jamie went to spend a Saturday in Fredericksburg. We went by way of Blanco and Johnson City, where we had done market events, and from Johnson City over so-called Texas Wine Road, through Stonewall, Grapetown and thence to Fredericksburg, with a stop at Wildseed Farms, hoping that their wildflower meadows would be in bloom – alas, too early in the year. I did see a few shy bluebonnets in a sheltered, sunny verge, and all the redbud trees are in full flower, but nothing much in comparison to what will be out in lavish bloom by the end of April. As a diversion, we counted wineries along the road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg – we came up with a total of 73, although we might have double-counted some and missed a few others. The whole of Route 290 seems now to be a prolonged and long party spot these days, which might account for a great many mildly sloshed people all along Main Street.

Fredericksburg has changed, since the first few times we visited, in the late 90s – and I’m not certain it’s for the better. Maybe I just liked it when they rolled up the sidewalks at sundown, save for a few restaurants on Main Street. The Fredericksburg Herb farm was really a herb garden with candles, perfume and skin-care items for sale along with seeds and herbs, and not under different ownership as a luxury spa. The old five and dime, which didn’t take credit cards and was about the last normal retail outlet on Main, is now an upscale retailer of expensive western wear (I scoped out a pair of $700 dollar women’s boots there and winced). The Christmas store also changed hands – now upscale boutique fashion items instead of Christmas things and garden décor. A big ultra-modern new luxury hotel took over what had been a very pleasant Beaux Arts-style two-story shop building, renovated it out of all previous experience and attached it at the back into a whole new ultra-modern sprawl. Rustlin’ Robs, Dogologie (the store for all things dog, which always has a dish of water by the door for their canine friends), Der Kuchen Laden (the best little housewares shop in Texas) and the Peach House are still there, which is reassuring. But the retail outlets, restaurants and businesses have spread from Main Street to Austin and San Antonio streets, replacing the modest little early 20th century cottages and older houses. About the only good expansion that I can see is that of the Museum of the Pacific War, which went from the old Nimitz Hotel and an open-sided pole barn a few blocks distant, to a big new complex and expanded outdoor complex where they state WWII reenactor events. At a book event there a few years ago, one of the members told us that there are now more B&B beds in the downtown area than there were regular homes. I can believe it, especially after this last Saturday.

We walked up several blocks, and crossed Main Street to walk the other side, noting the crowds, and also noting that there weren’t many families with children, and hardly anyone walking with a dog on a leash or in a doggie stroller. It seemed like it was more spring-break/party city, than a quaint, old-fashioned Texas country small town with an attractive and historic downtown. My daughter says – perhaps next time, we should visit during the week – not on a Saturday or a holiday. The brush fire getting going in the afternoon of that day in the hills north of town didn’t help our mood much, what with pale beige clouds of smoke piling up like clouds, and the occasional siren on a brush fire truck roaring through town. We drove home, looking over our shoulders almost all the way.

20. December 2024 · Comments Off on The New Book Series! · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

So – mercifully what I thought of as a sort of creative dry spell has somehow come unblocked, what with putting out West Towards the Sunset this week. I had thought a little about making that book the first in a series, following the Kettering family on the emigrant trail west to California in 1846. I thought, in a rather half-hearted fashion, about creating it as part of a multivolume family story, rather like the Little House series, but nothing much came to mind, once I gotten them into California. I had set up some future elements by briefly mentioning certain developments, but the trouble was that if I carried them out completely, and brought the overall story forward to include all kinds of adventures and characters – the main character, Sally, would age out of being a tween-teen. It would also be a stretch, historically, to involve a female character in what was almost exclusively a male domain, in Gold Rush era California. The story would transition into something more like an adult novel … and I wanted to keep the main character relatable to younger readers. The poor kidlets need a good thrilling, informative read, after all the values-free grey goo and perversity that is otherwise inflicted on them by the current established YA fare.

What to do, what to do …

What to do … would be to make subsequent volumes sequentially centering on Sally’s younger brothers and sisters. Eureka! That would let me carry on with teen-tween characters within the same established family. I could write in Jon’s adventures early in the Gold Rush, and a younger sister and even younger brother pick up later segments of the overall story arc. The potential stories and characters over two decades of this part of the wild and woolly West are practically limitless. The Gold Rush itself, then the silver rush into Nevada’s Comstock Lode, odd-ball characters, vigilantes and crime galore, stage coaches, the railway and the Pony Express. I could write the youngest brother into being an associate of Samuel Clemens, when he was roughing it on the frontier in his early days as a writer. And then it seemed like I was back in the fountain of creativity; ideas for plots, characters and twists and turns of a narrative all popped into mind.

I have all the reference books already, and there were so many elements, events and real-life characters that I couldn’t fold into my previous Gold Rush book, I can hardly wait to start on the next one. But I promise that I will wrap up the Luna City series before I even start on the next book in the Kettering family saga.